A “mobile application,” or “mobile app,” is a computer program designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone or a tablet computer. Mobile apps typically are distributed through platforms such as the GOOGLE PLAY® store. Typically, mobile apps can be downloaded from the platform to a target device, such as a mobile phone. Public demand for mobile applications, and the availability of developer tools, drove rapid expansion of the mobile app space over the past decade.
An ad “quality score” or “quality index” is a measure used by some online ad distributors, in part to increase the effectiveness of ads for the advertiser, increase the relevance of ads to the consumer, and (as a result) increase the ad distributor's revenue. To that end, a quality score can take into account, for example, the predicted click-through rate (CTR) of an ad, the relevance of the ad itself to the consumer's context, the relevance of the ad's landing page, the load time of the ad's landing page, and the nature of the targeted device.
A “push notification,” also called a “server push notification,” is the delivery of information from a software application to a computing device without a specific request from the client. Unlike pull notifications, in which the client must request information from a server, push notifications originate from a server. One aspect of push notifications in mobile device computing is that the technology does not require an application on a mobile device to be open in order for a message to be received. This allows the mobile device to receive and display notifications for mobile applications such as social media or text messaging even when the device's screen is locked and the application that is pushing the notification (for example, from a server of the application) is closed.